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Well D.E.I.M.O.S. Decided to CTD everytime i entered a particular area, so i wrote it off and decided to complete the main quest line, something i’ve been putting off for a couple of years now!

I Went with No Gods No Masters in the end, and in true Fallout: New Vegas Style It was a buggy, crash ridden mess right until the end credits.

Originally Posted by sonson

Have you seen Wasteland Defense, where you set up a fort against raiders? Or Real Time Settler, where you establish a settlement, put followers to work, defend and trade and make alliances? World of Pain effectively doubles the play area and adds hundreds of NPC’s and new locations which fit seamlessly for the most part both in terms of lore and balance. Not on the same level of weight but in terms of quality there’s also Niner, a companion with his own quest, dialogue (in a Yorkshire accent, which certainly feels different in the Mojave) and perks and traits. He feels as official and essential as someone like Shale from Dragon Age even though he’s only a fan mod.

Real time settler and Wasteland Defence look like great mods to be included AFTER the plot line has been finished. I there any sort of extended ending mod kicking around?

Niner looks interesting, how does he compare to the other big companion Mod, Willow? I had her along in the later part of my game and i thought she was really well done.

Originally Posted by snson

One question-did you start a new character for Bounties, or just load an old save?

I loaded them into my current game. But once someguy has finished his mods and linked them into one massive piece of super content i might start up a new character and go through those, maybe with the J.E. Sawyer mod.

Btw does anyone know how J.E. Sawyer and Project Nevada work together?

Skyrim with mods (lots of mods). I've been running the gamut with various mods in terms of overall improvement both in terms of visual fidelity (better textures & lighting) general improvements (better UI, better animations, improved maps, more control over companions) and better looking characters (Skyrim was a step up from the potato face maker known as Oblivion, but not by much) with improved faces, bodies & hair. Sadly my rather aged 460 GTX seems to struggle with any ENB mods which is a tad annoying (and makes me really hanker for a 600 series GPU), but otherwise I'm quite enjoying the tinkering, though it has necessitated the odd reinstall/restart of the game.

Things I've learnt: -

1) Always use the nexus mod manager rather than Steam workshop. You've a lot more control and it makes life easier if things go tits up and you need to reinstall/uninstall a mod.

2) Always save a vanilla copy of your skyrim folder. If you need to nuke the site from orbit, then it's worthwhile having it so you can delete the old and then replace.

3) Note down the order you install things in (especially texture packs), useful so you can determine where issues may lie (I had hours of fun figuring out how I managed to break my ingame textures at one point).

4) Tools like BOSS and TESVEdit are benefitial if you're running into mod conflicts to help you determine what the problem is and being able to fix it.

5) Having more than one companion (aka loot mule) on the go is great, esp when you're on extended excursions. Though don't give them all bows otherwise you'll never get to fight because they will boggart every opponent.

6) For some people (generally the Japanese it seems) there's no such thing as too big, or too dark.

Well D.E.I.M.O.S. Decided to CTD everytime i entered a particular area, so i wrote it off and decided to complete the main quest line, something i’ve been putting off for a couple of years now!

I Went with No Gods No Masters in the end, and in true Fallout: New Vegas Style It was a buggy, crash ridden mess right until the end credits.

Real time settler and Wasteland Defence look like great mods to be included AFTER the plot line has been finished. I there any sort of extended ending mod kicking around?

Niner looks interesting, how does he compare to the other big companion Mod, Willow? I had her along in the later part of my game and i thought she was really well done.

I loaded them into my current game. But once someguy has finished his mods and linked them into one massive piece of super content i might start up a new character and go through those, maybe with the J.E. Sawyer mod.

Btw does anyone know how J.E. Sawyer and Project Nevada work together?

Niner is just like the other NPC’s you can ally with. He has a few quests and is fully involved until you get to Vegas. After that he still interacts with you as per other companions once their quest is done, but you won’t get anything new. And I think that’s fine to be honest. It works flawlessly though and probably is a better example of what the companion system can achieve than is included in the game. He passes comment on stuff and sings while you’re travelling as well, and also gets drunk and takes chems and stuff leaving you vulnerable at points, so in that sense is a far more real and fleshed out companion than anyone else. He has a personality which exist outside of you asking him stuff, so feels far more relational than the vanilla options in my opinion. Only thing I’d say is that he’s pretty overpowered with his machine gun if that matters. He’d be pretty pointless taking in non violent playthrough for example. He provides the narrative solution for taking a meandering route to Vegas though, which I think is really necessary. Always feels a bit odd stopping off in a radioactive cave or Vault to have a poke around when someone who shot you in the face is on the loose. But add in Niner’s story and travelling together and randomly works very well.

Willow looks excellent from what I’ve seen but to be honest I find her a bit of a lore breaker and also she makes me panic whenever I think the permuations of her wandering around the wasteland if I’m honest. She’s kooky, trusting, vulnerable but has somehow managed to make it this far in a violent, lawless, male dominated world without something atrocious happening to her. Willow seems like a very well acted and fleshed out character, probably better polished than any vanilla NPC too like Niner, just not one who fits in the Mojave. If you met her in Vegas as a sheltered and reckless gambler who wanted to see the world, there would be no issue I don’t think, but I can’t buy her being so innocent and intact trekking the Mojave for any length of time.
It makes sense with characters like Sunny Smiles, Cass and Veronica as they have an element of street/wasteland sense to them, and also an element of social protection too-BOS for Veronica, caravans for Cass, generally being out of the way of trouble for Sunny.

I also added the DFB Random encounters mod yesterday as I feel travelling the Mojave should feel dangerous for at least a third of the journeys you make. As long as you have the Mod Configuration manager you can choose how often enemies spawn, how many, where etc, even set up occasional encounters between two parties duking it out, and then the mod randomly spawns them for you in set areas. There’s the option to have everyone spawn randomly like Nightkin, Enclave and BOS, but you can also turn them off. I’ve kept things lore friendly by just permitting fiends, raiders and that sort of thing. Types you would expect to just try and kill you while travelling.

I’m also thinking in the future of trying this mod which makes everything a real survival simulator. Project Nevada and Sawyer just make things feel slightly more involved, plenty enough for you to really get involved in the meat of the game which is the infighting and social stuff, but this amps them up to a really huge degree and turns things into a dessert survival simulator. So if you break your leg and use a doctors bag, you still have a splint modifier for 12 hours. You can’t use Vats if someone shoots your hand, you get knocked over if you get shot, you have to drink as many litres in a day as is true to life, resources are more scarce, every bullet should be wisely invested, that sort of thing I wouldn’t want to play anything approaching a full game with this on but doing some exploring and a few quests would I think be a good, and very different experience.

Can't see there being an issue with the Sawyer and PN mods working together but unless I've missed something they're essentially the same, with PN allowing you to make things quite a bit more extreme.

I've also started the single player. Sadly for me, zerg are my least favourite race. It's still enjoyable though.

I didn't like them as much going into it but I've started to like them more and more. Having Kerrigan at all times is nice, and the mission designs are cool too. I doubt I'll dabble with any mp though.

The final part of the game is without a doubt rushed like there's no tomorrow, and the ending left way too many things unanswered or unexplained.
But even with that, it was still quite the experience. The setting and OST alone make it worthwhile.

Btw does anyone know how J.E. Sawyer and Project Nevada work together?

Quite well, actually. As far as I know there are no significant bugs when using both. Just be aware that whichever mod you load last in your mod order will win out whenever their changes conflict.

I'm replaying Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, this time as a Gangrel. I've decided to go for an evil playthrough, being aggressive to everyone and trying to kill as many named characters as possible. So far it's suprising just how many unique dialogue options there are for characters with low humanity. They put a lot of effort into an aspect of the game few players will ever see.

I'm playing Bit.Trip presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rythm Alien. That's its name. All of the bold stuff.

And, having loved, but absolutely failed at Bit.Trip Runner, this new iteration is much more acessible, and also better in every way.

Now that there are checkpoints, which only ever influence your leaderboard position and nothing else, I'm getting a positive Super Meat Boy vibe from it. There are endless jokes, bonus levels, and additional characters and costumes spread around the game and its levels, and they are tough, but possible, not like the first game.

I guess the tl,dr is that I'm ragequitting less and less, that says it all. If steam tracked ragequits (a sudden death quickly succeeded by alt-F4) I would have gotten at least some achievement in the first game.

Oh, ok. But THEY aren't going to announce that full name everytime you boot up the game, are they? Well, in Runner2 (my suggestion for the short version, official approvement pending) the admittedly funny announcer first announces his name, then the full game title, unskippably (my new favurite word), every time.

But, Y'know, I like the game so much, I'm calling it satire and moving on.

I played the first mission of Heart of the Swarm. The writing is already kicking my jimmies into overdrive.
Then I noticed the achievements are disabled.
I really like achievements in Blizzard games. They have cool icons, unlock cute stuff and I like watching numbers go up. So I had to stop playing.

I played the first mission of Heart of the Swarm. The writing is already kicking my jimmies into overdrive.
Then I noticed the achievements are disabled.
I really like achievements in Blizzard games. They have cool icons, unlock cute stuff and I like watching numbers go up. So I had to stop playing.

They've been having problems with them on and off all week, but when they've been reenabled I've received all of the achievements that I earned while they're disabled.

And the writing doesn't get much better. The gameplay is good, there are some ridiculously fun single player only units to play with, but it's the usual cliché Blizzard story and acting.

I've been playing and achievements are back on, I never noticed them being off.

The writing is amazingly ham fisted though. Jesus christ it's bad. I can actually picture the best they could come up with was "Kerrigan looks sad here - then she gets angry cause Jims not around - then she gets confused by something - then she gets sad again *ps art director - really make her look sad, like not just :( but :< * "

"Halo is designed to make the player think "I look like that, I am macho sitting in my undies with my xbox""

Had my first chat with Caesar last night (killed him right out first play through). One of the most engaging moments in a game I’ve had I think. As someone who has devoured history for years and studied it for four at University it was rivetting. I don’t know if I’ve ever come across a better communicated definition of Hegelian Dialectics. And even more incredibly, it was actually relevant to mention it as well.

The presence of the Legion disappointed me as both being a pretty obvious choice in terms of protagonist faction, (A go-to Imperailist force who did morally repugnant things in the name of keeping the peace and bringing civilisation, never seen that before) as well as an uninspired one. At least make something better up than outright rehash of the Roman Empire. Make them more American and more befitting of the lore. Just something less kitsch and cartoony. I could never envisage me siding with them.

Talking to Caesar though reveals that an incredible amount of thought actually went into it all, what the with the whole Hegelian dialectic elements. It was a choice about moving the series as a whole forward. Up to this point in the series the emphasis has been on people grafting out survival, and that was very much the essence of the earlier Fallout Games, the extremity of human action produced by, or indeed causing, the context you find your character in, and the social themes around that. All great stuff of course.

With the introduction of New Vegas though you move onto themes beyond frontier survival, and really into grand politics proper rather than the more small scale social solutions and compromise (although occasional elements like Vault 11 are maybe there to suggest that the two aren’t always that different..).
The presence of the Legion, it’s purpose so clearly explained by Caesar in his treatise on political philosophy, addresses the elephant in the room that was maybe hanging after the first three games-what next? The Third iteration seemed to end with the suggestion that the future was nothing more than a perpetual state of survialsim and misery ala The Road. NV explicitly addresses that with the device of a faction who are actively trying to enforce a historical, not just political, revolution. The Legion are not primarily defined by pragamtics and circumstance, as is the case with pretty much everyone you encounter in the Fallout Series, but ideological intent and posterity, and an emulation of the Pax Romana acts as perfect means to tie circumstance and the forging of a new historiogrpical narrative together. The Legion is a deliberatley historical antidote to create a post-historical Fallout world in the Fallout Universe.

That in itself is pretty clever, but to craft a world as involved and grand for that to make sense, and for that explanation to further lift and intensify the whole narrative, is a truly incredible feat for a videogame I think. If the fate of the Mojave is my main concern (which of course, it might not be) the game has presented a set of resolutions which really have no clear winner, without that being a contrived, deliberately earnest grey area trope. Each side just offers something different, all of them plausible depending on where you’re coming from, and that can also evolve and change over time as well. It’s mindblowing to think how much work must have gone into the design to allow that to carry from the grand scale choices down to the momentary minuatie, from the dialogue to the actual moving parts as it were.

Also, talking to Benny before you kill him reveals some really strong writing that hints at his tribal character and makes him actually memorable for something more than his suit and being Chandler, which I wasn’t expecting. Nice touch. Actually felt..something.. killing him, rather than completely indifferent towards him as was the case before that conversation.

I agree. I was one of the few people who embraced the "humanity is moving on" theme from Fallout II and New Vegas. We progress and as long as there's some of us left on the planet we'll use whatever we have to improve our lot.